Chart Gallery Stats: Months TTC versus Age

FertilityFriend.com's Chart Gallery has grown into a widely used, valuable community resource. The advanced search capabilities provide multiple ways to sift through the thousands of charts posted by members.

In addition to filtering the charts by keywords and chart tags, the search feature provides the average age and average months TTC (Trying To Conceive) for the current search:

You can easily get a breakdown per chart category as well as average time to conceive and average age of the charters for your specific search results.

To provide some insight into time to conception by age, we conducted a preliminary study using 43, 464 charts from the gallery that resulted in pregnancy. We plotted the months TTC versus age:

This curve represents the data stored in the Chart Gallery.

The time to conceive increases with age as expected. Generally, the time to conceive before 20-21 years old is very short . Up to age 30, the time to conceive is relatively stable and then starts to increase again. The largest step occurs just after age 40.

This data comes directly from the chart gallery and is submitted by members on a voluntary basis. Although the data sample is not perfect, it provides some insight on the relationship between age and time to conceive. It may also give some basic idea of the time to conceive keeping in mind all the limitations and skewing factors of the data sample.

These findings are fairly consistent with existing data from other sources which indicate that women beyond their mid-twenties take longer to conceive (Dunson et al 2002; Taylor 2003).

This data shows only the time to conception for women who successfully conceived. It does not represent the likelihood of conception by age. Women who are beyond their peak fertility years should not necessarily despair- but should perhaps be prepared for a more lengthy time trying to conceive. The chances of conception within two years are as high as 85% for women age 35-40 (Taylor 2003) and may be increased further by focusing intercourse during the fertile time (Hilgers 1992).

Dunson, D. B., B. Colombo, et al. (2002). "Changes with age in the level and duration of fertility in the menstrual cycle." Hum Reprod 17(5): 1399-403.